Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/378

362 CRITICAL STUDIES all these things." They love to symbolise their Lord and the Holy Spirit by the lamb and the dove, which are among the most silly and cowardly and helpless of animals ; they are dreadfully affronted if you consider the vulture, the ape, the toad equally symbolic of their God; yet nothing can be more evident than that every thing and being created (not excluding their devil) must faithfully represent or express some portion or characteristic of the Creator. If "I am the vine " is a true text, equally true must be " I am the aconite ; " nay, our total-abstinence friends would maintain that the former has been and is far more extensively fatal to our race than the latter. So much for theology : as for science, it surely scorns the idea of classing things as in origin and essence good or evil, according as they seem beneficial or noxious to man. Spinoza is here incomparably more enlightened than this nineteenth -century man of science. We now reach "W. M. W.," p. 89, a poem ad- dressed to the writer's brother (author, I presume, of "Spirit Drawings, a Personal Narrative," 1858), followed by another to " E. W." his wife, on the death of their Httle son, who in a third poem, "Teddy's Flower," sends them a message of good cheer from the world of spirits, as the close informs us : — "Teddy through Hood, Who has walked through Teddy's wood, And seen his garden wall, Because Hood loves the small." I am bound to add that though the message is delivered by Hood, its style and character are of